An oak-beamed pub in a Cotswold village isn't necessarily where you'd look for the UK's future rivals to the brains behind Yahoo! and Google. But that's where Microsoft held the three-day "codeathon" final of the Imagine Cup student programming competition, now in its second year, designed to find the developers of tomorrow.
Teams of students from all over the world compete to design, develop and present applications. As well as pocketing an Xbox apiece, the three winners from this UK round will compete in the final in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in July, hoping to walk away with the $25,000 prize money.
The UK competition started in October with an online quiz that 4,500 students entered; the second round whittled the numbers down to 29 finalists. Not all are on computing courses: there were mathematicians and scientists with little programming experience and the mix of ages meant that several were first years who hadn't done any group programming projects. Psychometric personality profiling, used by the organisers to assign students and mentors into seven teams, seemed to compensate for those differences, and many of the students found it easy to settle down to work in their team once they got to the event. They sorted out their own roles within the teams: one group described themselves as "Mr Algorithm, Mr AI, Mr Developer and Mr Free Thinker". (Sadly, all the finalists - and mentors - were male.)
The previous two weeks of virtual teamwork via email and instant messaging were less productive in most cases, but that was often because the students had degree projects to work on. The pressure of the deadline kept them working through the night and turning to the programmer staples of chocolate bars and delivery pizza, ignoring the Xboxes and the bar in the next building to master their tools and finish their applications.
Each team got a different brief, but they were all the kind of project that real-world developers are tackling: a tracking system for a courier company, a mobile system for scheduling service engineers working for a utility company, an ambulance tracking system that sends information back to the emergency department, and an in-car information system that combines maps and routes with alerts about traffic and speed cameras. The winning team - Ali Gardezi from the University of Sheffield, Andrew Grieve from the University of Aberdeen and Mat Steeples from the University of Hull - might have had something of a home advantage as they were designing a student information system that covers everything from online timetables with links for ordering the right textbooks to reviews of local pubs and shops.
The emphasis was on mobility: the projects called for delivering information to smart phones and PDAs, and the team designing the ambulance tracker used Tablet PCs to let doctors scribble instructions on photos of incoming patients and send them back to the ambulance team. Microsoft was also looking for smart applications, and the students used neural nets and artificial economies to make their applications learn as they go along, rather than trying to hard-code information like which roads are busy and which pubs are popular.
Even the computing students didn't have much prior experience with Microsoft.net, especially not the .Net Compact Framework used for handhelds and mobiles, which had several of them muttering darkly. One Visual Basic fan was happy to admit the power of the C# language but planned to go straight back to VB at the earliest opportunity. They all found MapPoint particularly challenging, and the variable mobile phone coverage on the site was a timely reminder that mobile applications need to be designed to cope with a network that won't always be available.
But they enjoyed tackling real-world problems rather than the abstract exercises they sometimes face at college, and working through the projects from start to finish in one go, rather than planning an application one term and coming back to code it months later. And they shared the industry enthusiasm for web services as a way of pulling together legacy systems with third-party information and linking the parts of their applications - a useful tool for team-based development whoever's doing the coding.
Web services also make it easier to add more services and features in the future, and while some groups concentrated on a solution for part of the problem, the more successful teams produced frameworks that they could extend to deliver complex solutions or scale up to cope with more users. That's an approach that makes good business sense and all the students had grasped the importance of having a business model for their application. Some of them had certainly got the flavour of industry jargon, explaining that they'd fully exposed their application infrastructure through XML web services. In many ways it was like any normal product briefing, and it's good to know the developers of tomorrow have a little business nous as well as some good ideas.
